Wednesday’s lunchtime concert at Heliconian Hall; part of Toronto Summer Music, featured two pieces of chamber music by Beethoven and Shostakovich. The first was the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op.132. It was played by Justin Saulnier, Ashley Tsai, Bill Ko and Claire Park. It’s an unusual movement, especially taken out of context. It intersperses intricate, very slow passages where phrases are passed between the players without too much in the way of obvious clues for where the music is going. It’s profound and quite ethereal. These sections arr interwoven with livelier sections where the “cues” are more obvious. I would think it’s difficult to get just right at the best of times and for what amounts to a “scratch” quartet to handle it as well as they did is admirable. It feels like the sort of music that one needs to play with the same colleagues for twenty years! Incidentally, the same team is playing all four movements of this work tomorrow at noon.
Musically August is pretty quiet in Toronto. Opéra Queens have a PWYC concert; Sisters in Arms, at the Tranzac on the 1st (5-7pm). Confluence Concerts emerging artists programme has a concert called Side-by-Side at Heliconian Hall on the 20th and that’s about it. There’s a bit more happening in the theatre world. 
The Imagined is a new album of piano music by Alice Ping Yee Ho played by Christina Petrowska Quilico. There are four works. The first is Pictures from an Imagined Exhibitiion which riffs off pictures by Hong Kong ink master Wesley Tongson and Christina Petrowska Quilico herself. There are four movements. “Free Strokes” is kind of minimalist with arpeggios and repeated figures. It sounds weird to say it but it sounds “watery”. “Distant Drums” is similar in some ways but faster and with some much darker passages. “Mystical Mountains” by contrast is slower and darker with a kind of doom-laden quality. Finally “Dancing Colours” is bright and playful with, I think, some modal elements. It’s all quite virtuosic with occasional distinctly “non-western” touches.
operaramblings 